"Degussa Homogeneous Catalysts" to market Catalysis Project House successes

17.11.2003

Due to the commercial success that the Catalysis Project House is already reaping in the field of homogeneous catalysis following no more than two and a half years of research, Degussa AG of Dusseldorf, Germany, is now setting up an in-house start-up by the name of Degussa Homogeneous catalysts to launch homogeneous catalyst products and technologies onto the market. The new start-up is to begin producing and marketing ligands and homogeneous catalysts in January 2004, and will also be offering supporting services that enable swift detection of homogeneous catalysts. Its products and services will be of primary interest to the pharmaceuticals industry as they significantly improve access to new active pharmaceutical ingredients or intermediates. This kind of homogenous catalysts have scarcely been available on the market to date, meaning that Degussa is answering a need by providing such catalysts in commercial quantities. The company is already one of the leading suppliers of heterogeneous catalysts, and has extensive experience in the use of homogeneous and biocatalysts. "This early market entry would not have been possible without the commitment and outstanding performance of the project house team," states Dr. Alfred Oberholz, Degussa Board Member responsible for Research and Development. "Our approach of taking research in the area of forward-looking technologies, pooling it into interdisciplinary project houses and conducting it in a close-to-market manner is again proving its worth." Degussa Homogenous Catalysts, is taking up business with eleven employees in the newly-erected Catalysis Competence Center in Hanau-Wolfgang, near Frankfurt on Main, and will be headed by Antje Gerber. Its suite of products includes ligands as well as metal complex catalysts for the pharmaceutical industry, both substances that are already available to some extent in commercial quantities. In the area of catalysts, Degussa Homogeneous Catalysts will be marketing ten patented product families for asymmetric hydrogenations and C-C coupling reactions. The in-house start-up will also be offering customers support in the search for the most suitable ligand or catalyst for a given reaction. The service involves catalyst screening and testing by means of the high-throughput methods developed by the Catalysis Project House as well as use of Degussa's Catalyst Library of several thousand catalysts. The in-house start-up will be taking up production of the homogeneous catalysts step by step in existing installations. In the process it will benefit from the technology know-how of Degussa, since the production of ligands, for example, involves complex chemistry. This is the reason why ligands and homogeneous catalysts have scarcely been available in commercial amounts to date. The start-up's typical production capacity will comprise quantities of up to several hundred kilograms per year, whereby these comparatively small amounts are explained by the tremendous leverage effect that catalysts wield. Experts place the value of goods involving different catalyst systems in their production at between $ 500 billion and $ 2,500 billion a year all over the world. In comparison, the current market volume for all kinds of catalysts lies at a mere approx. $ 10 billion a year, but the market is growing at an annual 5 percent. Degussa Homogeneous Catalysts - which will be managed by Creavis Technologies & Innovation, a Degussa corporate venture company - will be working in close collaboration with the Catalysis Pro-ject House, which is scheduled to end in June 2004. Degussa Homogeneous Catalysts is Degussa's second in-house start-up to market project house research findings, the first being Degussa Advanced Nanomaterials. Degussa has adopted this particular approach as it enables the entrepreneurial flexibility of an operative unit while avoiding the organizational and financial effort of setting up a legally autonomous enterprise.

https://www.chemie.de/news/31644/degussa-homogeneous-catalysts-to-market-catalysis-project-house-successes.html